Friday, November 24, 2006

I went to Target this morning and it wasn't so bad. I only missed out on 1 item. Although this item was the reason I went there, I may still have been able to get it if I hadn't bumped into other ppl and started to chat. I passed by a neighborhood Best Buy after my shopping at Target and was glad I wasn't part of that madness. Now, back to work. Yes, my client is working today and so must I.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

My Chinese speaking skills continue to decline as I get older. The opportunity for me to speak Chinese has become non existent these days. The only times I do speak is when I order food at a Chinese restaurant. So my vocabulary gets smaller each week, month, urgh. Having grown up in the US, my Chinese writing and reading skills are very poor. I can't read a Chinese menu! I have to go on memory and even that is starting to fade with age.

So, I've made it a point to speak to my daughter in Chinese only. That's hard since my Chinese sucks and I end up using a lot of English anyways. So I decided that I should learn to write and read Chinese to help improve my Chinese. My goal is to eventually read a Jin Yong (Louis Cha) novel(s).

Having my old beginning Chinese books from my college days (easy As), I started to learn Chinese writing/reading. I thought that if I got 500-700 characters down in the next couple of years, I should be good to go. Well, I found out that I need 1500-1800 characters to just read the newspaper. Plus, I am learning Traditional Chinese. So, if I do learn these, I'll have to relearn 2000+ for their Simplified counterpart.

Wish me luck. I hope to do all this by the age of 40. That'll be around the time my daughter rebels and wants to stop learning Chinese.